Suggested

Doing it without the book

The smartphone is on its way to making traditional
guidebooks obsolete, says David Rowan

Last spring, Josh Williams was in Amsterdam and wanted to spend a
quiet hour in a welcoming coffee shop. Having consulted his
Lonely Planet guidebook, he headed for a place nearby that
seemed to fit the bill. 'But on the way, using the internet,' says
Williams, 'I found four or five other cafés that looked more
appealing than the one that the guide pointed me to. And these
places just weren't in the book.' We've all been there:
conventional travel guides, despite promising the gospel truth on a
destination, can get out of date frustratingly quickly.

Williams thinks he has found a solution. The 32-year-old is CEO of
Gowalla, a company based in Austin, Texas, that offers an
always-current, online alternative to dead-wood travel guides.
Three years ago Gowalla was primarily a location-based social
network, on which users could 'check in' to a building, say, to
show others where they were. In September, Gowalla relaunched with
a travel focus. Now it offers carefully curated travel guides for
more than 60 cities, from Bangkok to Baltimore. These are formed of
a mix of lists, tips and recommendations generated by Gowalla's
staff - as well as by the user's friends and the local population -
all accessible via a mobile handset.

So it's too bad for the rest of us that Facebook bought Gowalla in
December, to improve its own location-based offerings, and then
said it would shut down its travel guides. What Gowalla's service
offered was reliability. 'People will email us and say, "The store
hours for this place are wrong," or, "This restaurant's address has
changed,"' says Williams. 'These are folks who are passionate about
keeping databases up to date.' And the format is easier to read on
the go: 'We see our content as more short-form, not a lengthy
review like you might find on a website or in a magazine. For a
restaurant it's much more, "There's a great patio, and you should
order this wine, and here's a photo of one of the dishes." You only
need a couple of data points to decide if this is somewhere you're
interested in.' A recommendation from a friend, he says, is much
more compelling than one from a faceless author.

Thankfully, Gowalla isn't alone. There are a number of next-gen
travel guides emerging, each taking a subtly different approach.
Indeed, this magazine has its own set of apps, Condé Nast Traveller iPhone City Guides, which offer
searchable listings, GPS-enabled interactive maps and
augmented-reality features that layer information over the feed
from the handset's video camera. Elsewhere, San Francisco-based
NileGuide differentiates itself with a 'Q and A' feature, which
allows tourists to ask a global network of more than 100,000 people
for travel advice. These locals don't get paid, though - so why do
they do it? 'A big subset are just fired up about their town and
city,' says Josh Steinitz, NileGuide's CEO. 'But another group have
a vested interest in connecting with travellers - they may be tour
guides, or own a restaurant or bed and breakfast, and want to
connect.'

Still, mobile phones, unlike books, come with data charges. Fixing
that is one of Gowalla's big tasks: Williams plans to let users
download a city's worth of data to their handset for viewing
offline. And once such problems are solved, he argues, the
paper-and-ink guidebook will die. 'If we're brutally honest with
ourselves,' he says, 'it's all about these magical phones we carry
around.'

David Rowan is editor of 'Wired' magazine.Published in Condé Nast Traveller February 2012.